Rebecca smiled at the memory. “It was just the regulars until Maurice walked in. He has a way of showing up somewhere and making it his—even if he's never been there. That's exactly what happened that night. There I was, grabbing whiskey behind the bar and hiking up my dress to hopefully get some decent tips when in walks this man.”
“That's right,” Maurice said, strolling over to the bar for another drink from the balancer's decanter. Malcolm turned his head away before he went mad… if he wasn't there already. He didn't look up until Maurice sat down at the table, his glass empty. “This stuff's good. Too good.”
Malcolm's fingers trembled when he held his cards in front of him. The shapes and numbers painted on them began to blur. They blended together and morphed until no amount of squinting could separate the colored splotches. He threw in his next bet blindly, watched the chips wobble in the center of the table.
“What's wrong?” Maurice said.
“He's feeling the heat, babe,” said Rebecca, smiling. “High stakes game for a high stakes man.”
Maurice nodded. “That's right. These are the kind of game I lived for.” He chuckled. “Live for, I guess. But I always had a way of finding where the action was. That's what happened in Tattersall.”
Rebecca bounced off his lap to pour herself a shot of gold. “You should have seen Maurice that night. He wiped the floor with those regulars. They cursed him and left in a huff, but they all paid him. He stuck around while I cleaned up, bought me a drink and told me I was beautiful. Once he started talking about all his adventures I knew he was the man I would marry—the man I'd love forever.”
Maurice raked in another pot of chips and smiled. “Rebecca wanted me to take her far away from Tattersall. I told her to meet me the next morning at my hotel room—she was too much of a lady to come back with me that night...” His face darkened. “Except that never happened. A couple of town idiots got to me first.”
Rebecca shook her head. “Lou and Dale. Those louts were just sore a stranger showed up and cleaned them out. They kept drinking after Maurice took their money—they always did—and came up with some scheme swearing they saw a card up Maurice's shirt sleeve.”
“Were they right?” Malcolm said. “Did you cheat?”
Maurice shrugged. “They found me easy enough. Word travels fast when a stranger sweeps into a dust speck town. I woke to someone banging on my door. When I opened it—I thought it was Rebecca changing her mind—they called me a cheat and left me with a few holes in my chest.”
Rebecca reached for more whiskey, her hand trembling. “They just let him die there on the floor. Can you imagine? Probably paid off Finley, the innkeeper, for staining his carpet and went and hid away in a hole somewhere like the pathetic animals they were. I found Maurice the next morning. Cold and dead and pale.” Tears welled in the corners of her eyes. “Lou and Dale got off scot-free of course. There was no justice in Tattersall—not for an outsider. I had to see them every night in that hell hole, drinking and playing cards and carrying on. The men who shot my poor Maurice.”
Her words flowed in and out of Malcolm's ears. It took everything he had just to keep upright in his seat. Every time they opened their mouths he smelled that golden liquid on their breath. The voices were back too. Urging him to run for the bar or reach across the table and rip that glass right out of their hands.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The room narrowed to an oblong tunnel.
Colors dissolved one by one until everything was covered in a lifeless gray. Just a few slivers of gold remained: they glowed in the bottle and in the bottom of Maurice's glass. Malcolm threw the last of his chips into the pile to cover the next hand's ante.
“It wasn't so bad for me,” Maurice said. “I always thought I'd live and die by the gun. But my poor Rebecca. The hell they put her through.”
“I had to go back to Lemhaven with my tail between my legs.” She nodded rapidly, like she was justifying the decision in that very moment. “I couldn't stay in that awful town anymore. Not after what they did to Maurice. My family took me back, but they had their conditions.”
“Richard being one of them,” Maurice said
Rebecca grimaced. “He was a nice boy with a stable profession. A doctor. Just the kind of man a Lem girl needed to keep herself out of trouble. They married me off a month later. That was another kind of hell. Worse than hell, really. Grinding, miserable purgatory where every day was exactly the same. He loved me—”
“Still does,” Maurice said.
“Yes. Still does. Richard was a good man, but I didn't love him like Maurice. So I was almost glad when the tuberculosis came a couple years later. At least he could find a different woman—someone who wouldn't spend the rest of his life letting him down.”
The dealer dealt three cards on the flop. “Queen of spades, eight of hearts, and eight of diamonds,” he said.
Malcolm checked his cards again, waited for his vision to clear. But it never did. The game continued in a formless haze. He wasn't totally blind, though. He couldn't miss Maurice's gigantic smile after the dealer called out the cards.
“You didn't explain how you became what you are,” Atlas said.
Everyone at the table turned to face him. He and his companions had fallen into the background, bland landscape paintings overlooked for a more dramatic spectacle.
Maurice shrugged. “That's where fate took a turn. There I was, lying on that dirty hotel room floor looking at all the blood. Everything went black. Then this man shows up. At least I think he's a man, but he's wearing a robe and a hood so I can't see his face.” Maurice closed his eyes. “He told me I'd always been a gambling man. Asked me if I wanted to make one more bet. When I told him yes—not with my words, but in my mind—he said, 'Bet on me. Bet on me, and live forever.'
“All I had to do was promise to help him when the time came. That was the handshake that made the bet good. Then I woke up in a new world. A world where I could do whatever I wanted. I just had to wait for my Rebecca. Then things would be perfect.” He looked at her and wiped some tears from her face.
“I still get goosebumps thinking about it,” she said. “When I heard that nurse telling my family it was time to say goodbye, and boom—I'm plucked away into a whole new world with Maurice.”
“It's been over a century now. The man's time never came. It's not going to come either, now that we're back up here. He made a fool's bet if he was expecting anything from me.”
“You've defied the natural order of things,” Atlas said, his net crackling as he thrashed against it. “Do you realize what you've done? What kind of consequences you've set in motion?”
Maurice waved him off. “We waited too long down there. Until I finally figured out how to take things into my own hands.”
“So we could live,” Rebecca said. “Really live like people do when they're in love.”
“He wouldn't understand,” Maurice said. “He doesn't know what it's like not to feel anything. That rush at the poker table. Whiskey warming your belly. The tingle from your true love's kiss. All gone. What's the point of living forever if your world is nothing but gray? I didn't sign up for that.”
“But there are—”
“I don't give a damn about consequences.” He leaned over and kissed Rebecca on the lips. “At least I'm alive again. All the consequences in the world are worth that.” Then, to Trig the dealer, “Flip the card.”
The dealer obeyed.
Malcolm checked his cards again. He still couldn't see them, and he watched helplessly as his world narrowed into a pinhole. The gold liquid in that glass filled his vision. He tried to cry out, but no words came. Something burned him from the inside, melting away his consciousness until there was only pain.
“Be good to me,” Maurice said. “One more time.”
Another card hit the table. Malcolm couldn't see what was on it. The golden light grew brighter. It blinded him now. When he closed his eyes he heard Maurice laughing, telling him it was a
good game.
Then he heard nothing at all.
His body snapped forward in his chair, every muscle firing like a cracking whip. There were gasps all around the table. Drinks spilled onto the felt. Maurice yelling about why can't he watch his stupid arms. Everything bathed in brilliant golden light. Then that light faded. Dimmer and dimmer—until his entire world plunged into darkness.
Malcolm's limbs thrashed, brought fresh screams from the drunken poker players. He didn't see these things—his eyelids were stapled shut by his seizure—but he felt them. His spinal cord straightened. A chair thudded to the ground somewhere behind him. Then he was floating, all connection to reality severed as his body moved like a crude tool.
“Stop it!” Maurice said. “I beat you. I beat you fair and—”
“Silence.”
That voice would have sent a chill down Malcolm's spine at any other time, but now his body was engulfed in molten heat. His limbs jerked again, shoulders popping out of their sockets with a snap. He tried to scream. But there was only rough movement.
He wasn't calling the shots anymore.
He was a passenger in his own body.
He felt his arms find the edge of the table and flip it over, dislocated shoulders be damned. A waterfall of chips crashing to the ground beneath him. Then, yelling. Everyone yelling. Everyone scrambling and shouting at one another and Malcolm moving right into the middle of it…
Blind.
Blind until whatever or whoever was in charge snapped his eyes open.
“Do something!” shouted Maurice. “Do something, you idiot!”
Malcolm's head swiveled to the sound of his voice. He and Rebecca huddled somewhere behind their servants, using them like human shields. Then the driver inside Malcolm's body steered him over there, crunching over wood splinters and shattered glass. Malcolm tried to scream again, but different words came out. Different words in a different voice.
“You've defied his orders. He came calling for you, but you weren't anywhere to be found.” A grotesque collection of sounds, foreign to all human ears. That voice grew louder, scathing in its intensity. “You abandoned him in his time of need. And now he abandons you in yours. Die. Die. Die!”
Rebecca screamed.
Malcolm shoved the servants—the few who hadn't already cowered in the corner—aside and grabbed her by the throat. His lips were still hot from the words that spilled out of him. A voice older than language. A voice older than time itself. “Die,” that voice whispered as he squeezed the life out of her. Maurice pounded his side. That just made the thing inside Malcolm clamp down harder on Rebecca's throat.
Then the thing Malcolm had become lifted Rebecca off the ground. She flopped against his chest like a caught fish, kicking her feet uselessly into the air. Maurice jumped on Malcolm's back, found his neck, and began to squeeze.
Pain.
The gambler's grip was strong. It crumpled his windpipe and made Malcolm gasp for air. Well, he would have gasped for air… if he were still in control of his body. Malcolm's lungs burned, his vision faded, and still he held the woman on the verge of death.
She opened her mouth in a silent scream before slipping out of consciousness. He felt her body go limp in his hands. Maurice screamed when he saw it and doubled the strength of his grip.
Malcolm couldn't breathe with the man's grubby hands on his neck. But somehow his chest continued to rise and fall, sucking in air and spewing it out with a mechanical efficiency. That thing was at work inside him. Pumping his lungs. Performing CPR from the inside out.
Then there was movement over the woman's shoulder, and for a moment that thing slipped out of Malcolm's skin. His head lolled to the side while he gasped for air…
And Maurice was on him.
“Do something, Atlas! Before he kills us all.”
Atlas emerged from behind the man's shadow, free from the net that had bound him and clutching the decanter of strange golden liquid. Malcolm wanted it—needed it—but that thing slipped inside him again before he could reach out and grab it.
Now that thing recoiled from the old man and his bottle. The liquid inside it was no longer an elixir, but a poison. Atlas lunged forward. He took out the stopper and thrust the open bottle in Malcolm's face.
There was a terrible shriek, though it came from no human mouth.
The liquid splashed all over him, covering him from forehead to groin. It sizzled when it made contact with his skin. It burned inside his mouth. That thing in Malcolm howled, but it refused to retreat. Dropping the woman now, it turned to Atlas instead. With one swift motion his neck was trapped, his body lifted right off the ground.
His face turned blue as he dangled there in mid air. He writhed like a wounded animal. But he refused to quit. Malcolm watched him point the bottle and let more liquid fly. Some of it splashed his face. Searing it. He squeezed Atlas's throat tighter, until the man couldn't even grunt or gasp.
Something snapped in Atlas then. He pried Malcolm's mouth open and shoved the bottle inside, setting his throat and stomach on fire with the golden liquid. Malcolm howled, not in his voice, but in the voice of that thing inside him.
Talia.
The demon.
He saw her slip out of his skin for half a second, and when he blinked she was gone. The only evidence she left was a swirling cloud of dust. Malcolm's eyes chased it around the room until it slipped through a little crack in a window and disappeared.
Then Malcolm's feet fell out from under him, and he crashed to the ground next to Atlas. It seemed like the old man was staring at him with his eyes open. Meditating or resting, almost. But the way those eyes rolled back—those perfectly rigid limbs.
He was gone.
Dead, at Malcolm's hand.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Malcolm tried to speak Atlas's name.
When no words came out, he tried to twist his body so at least he didn't have to look at the lifeless visage. But that didn't work either. He lay there like an anesthesia patient. He tried to scream. To beat the ground with his fists. To get out of here and vanish into the city before the gambler collected his debt.
He tried those things, and a thousand more…
Yet all he could do was watch the horror he'd set into motion.
Somewhere beside him, Maurice screamed at his servants. “Get Adeline! I don't care if she's working on the children. Hurry.” Then Malcolm smelled the golden liquid. That's right. Atlas had opened the bottle. There were shadows all around him now, though not one of them stopped to pay him any attention. When he got control of his neck, Malcolm turned it to where all the action was.
Maurice knelt over his love with the decanter to her lips. “Prop her head up,” he said, and a pair of hands—the dealer's from the poker game—slipped under Rebecca's shoulders. Maurice poured some liquid into her mouth. He never stopped moving his mouth the whole time, shouting orders and saying strange prayers. He felt her forehead with the back of his hand. Then he slapped her cheek.
“Baby? Wake up, baby. I need you to wake up.”
Rebecca stirred, and in went a deep breath through her nose. Maurice laughed when the wheezing sound continued. He cupped her face and kissed her on the forehead and watched her return to consciousness.
She didn't open her eyes for a long time, satisfied to keep sniffing the air in the dining room. “That smell,” she whispered. “That lovely smell.” Her eyes fluttered open and fixed on the bottle in Maurice's hand.
“Here,” he said, tilting her head back and filling her mouth once more.
Rebecca gulped it down. Each swallow added color to her face, pumping it with life. She didn't sit up until she'd had her fill. Maurice cradled her face and studied her eyes like he was seeing them for the first time.
Then his eyes found Malcolm.
“You son of a bitch. What do you think you're doing bringing another demon into my house?” He passed Rebecca to a servant, rose to his feet, and brushed lint off his seersucker suit.
&nb
sp; “I… didn't know,” Malcolm said.
Maurice laughed. “You'd have to be a fool not to. Just look at that mark on your arm.”
Malcolm looked down. His shirtsleeve—the one he'd put on in Talia's room in the dark—was rolled up from all the chaos. On the inside of his arm just above the elbow, a pair of crimson lips puckered on top of a vein. Malcolm tried to rub it off, but the mark was stubborn. Permanent. Touching it warmed his fingers, and when he stared at it long enough he could see it pulsing along with his heartbeat.
He looked up, on the verge of vomiting. How could he have been so stupid? The faces of his friends across the room offered no support. Paul and Charlotte looked at him with a mixture of hatred and disbelief. Hatred, for what the thing inside him had done to Atlas. And disbelief, at Malcolm's stupidity for letting it happen in the first place. He rolled his sleeve down to cover the mark. But it still seared the surface of his skin beneath his clothes.
“Tell me you'll be all right,” Maurice said.
Rebecca sat in a chair now while the nurse from downstairs fanned her with a cloth napkin. “I'll be all right, baby. Just had quite the shock is all. Thanks to that bitch who sneaked inside our house. What are we going to do with him?” She dangled a foot over the chair leg and shook it at the dead balancer.
“Trig'll find a nice place to drop the body,” Maurice said. “We got the bottle—I won it fair and square.”
Rebecca took another drink of the golden liquid. She drank it straight from the bottle this time, swallowing it as fast as she could and watching it refill itself. “You know what this means? We can let the children go.”
“Finally.”
She put down the bottle and smiled. “We don't need them anymore, baby. Now that we know we'll be here for good, we can have children of our own.”
Maurice offered his hand and helped her up with a smile. “We can talk about that last part later. After we settle our bets. I'm glad you're all right.”
Heretic (Demon Marked Book 2) (Demon Marked Saga) Page 10
